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HP is being accused of leaving a serious security vulnerability in its StoreOnce SAN system: a hard-coded administrator account in its management software.

According to this blog post published under the handle Technion, weeks of contact with HP's Software Security Response Team have failed to elicit a response, so the poster decided to go public.

“My last three weekly requests for an update have gone ignored,” Technion writes.

It's a simple and all-too-depressing scenario: during product development, someone creates a vendor admin account because nobody wants to waste time with password recovery, and the account stays in the product because nobody remembers to remove it.

It certainly looks like an accident: while Technion didn't post the password that the HPSupport account uses, he posted the SHA1 hash of it, and H Onlinewrites, “The password is just seven characters long and draws on a ten-year old meme”, suggesting that someone's already brute-forced it.

As Technion writes, “This hash is out there and it can't be taken away. Someone will crack it, and they will do so soon.”

HP has previously been bitten by secret backdoors. In 2010, its StorageWorks P2000 G3 MSA was found to have a similar undocumented account. The company's advisory at that time was that the admin account password could be changed by users through the command line interface. It's not yet known whether the StoreOnce admin account can be similarly secured.

The Register has sought comment from HP in Australia and the US, and will update this story if a response is received. ®